Orientalism is a dialectical feedback loop embedded in Enlightenment structures, not mere ideology

Evidence

Guénon does not take the complexity of this seeming internal contradiction—what Arendt called the “banality of evil”—to its logical conclusion, stopping descriptively at the political level; nor does Said reach Guénon’s limited understanding even of the complicity of “banal” Orientalism in mere “political undercurrents.” Nor, still, does he come close to the pattern of thought set by Guénon, which makes it abundantly clear that the function of Orientalism in “Western civilization” is eminently dialectical, a dialectic that rests within the deep structures of the Enlightenment and of Europe as a modern project, in all that its materialism, science, philosophy of the world, and much else of the same implied. Orientalism, on the one hand, feeds on the “culture without the principles,” in all of what we might call today discursive formations that are played out by the forces just enumerated, augmented by a pernicious theology of progress, and, on the other hand, feeds back into this civilization a bundle of errors and misrepresentations, all done with a striking banality. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 321

Categorization

• XREF: The dialectical feed-in/feed-back loop model parallels how other knowledge-curation work thinks of self-reinforcing ideological systems; connects to Arendt’s banality-of-evil again. — connects to: The Dialectic of Enlightenment targeted the whole Western rationalist tradition, not just Marxism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 781
• DEFINE: Clarifies the dialectical character of Orientalism: it both draws on and re-feeds the ‘culture without principles’ of Enlightenment modernity.